Around September 30, 1836

Before the invention of the multi-shot revolver, there were only single-shot muskets and hand guns. The main issue with a single-shot weapon is the time it takes to reload. It took twenty seconds to reload a single-shot flint lock firearm. In that time Indians, for instance, could shoot up to six arrows (Kinard 66). Soldiers in the heat of battle were left vulnerable while they took time to reload....

Three thousand five hundred dollars gone. In 1837, 3,500 dollars was a lot of money. Converting the sum to real 2005 terms, it would yield almost 69,000 dollars. The Panic of 1837 rendered every penny worthless. Judge Thomas Douglas of the Florida Supreme Court had been one of the wealthy class sponsoring the flurry of charters that brought unstable banks into existence, and now their failure meant...

James T. Ball and his wife Margaret P. Ball met Sally Smith at the Circuit Superior Court of Law in Fauquier County to settle the controversy over the will of Willis G. Smith, for which Sally Smith was administrator. The Balls did not think that they had been given the proper amount they had been bequeathed in the will. In the case, the court ruled that Sally Smith pay the Ball's nothing,...

"A knowledge of domestic duties is beyond price to a woman. Every one of our sex ought to know how to sew, and knit, and mend, and cook, and superintend a household." So began the article "Important Requisites in A Wife", published in the agricultural magazine The Cultivator, in April 1837. According to the author, a good wife considered her work...

Though a large religious presence existed in Missouri, its inhabitants succumbed to a great number of vices, including alcohol abuse amongst men. The widespread alcohol abuse in St. Louis, the gateway to the West, caused many that passed through the city to comment on the wicked city containing an excessive number of deists and infidels. Some cited alcohol abuse as a result of the growing population...

The trek by wagon train to Texas was one fraught with danger. Trail roads were rough, there were high rivers to cross, diseases to contend with, and of course the possibility of meeting up with Indians. Mary Maverick was making such a journey in the summer of 1837. She was traveling by wagon train from her home in Alabama to the new land of Texas. One day when her party was moving camp, 17 Tonkawa...

On a brisk morning in January of 1836, Dr. J. Marion Sims started his day with his routine house-to-house calls in Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. Sims was a well-established and distinguished practitioner of medicine who came to Alabama from South Carolina to establish his own medical practice; he was also best known for his accomplishments in Women’s health and for the establishment of the first Women’s...

John Dewery, a bright mulatto...nineteen or twenty years old, found himself in a precarious situation. As he was sitting in the Clark County Jail in Alabama on January 7, 1836, the Mobile Commercial Register published an announcement about his capture and arrest as an escaped slave. This was problematic because he swore in vain that he was a freed person. Nevertheless, the paper reported that if...

In Chapter XIX of Frederick Douglass's My Bondage My Freedom, he talked about how he was fed up with not being a free man and began to devise a plan to escape. At this point in Douglass's life he worked for Mr. Freeland, and even though he considered him a friend, the idea of being enslaved his entire life gave Frederick the drive to escape. It was the beginning of 1836, and Fredrick...

As early as 1830, three years before the Nullification Compromise, South Carolinians in the coastal Georgetown area became agitated with raised tariffs. This financial strain, however, concerned Southerners less than its implications for domestic policy. They warned, If it is not, it ought to be understood that the Tariff is only one of the subjects of complaint in the South. The Internal Improvement,...